Alec Soth’s aw shucks hokey americana is so incredibly over exposed and dull... the arts page equivalent of yet another plea to understand the white midwestern Trump voter. Please diversify your coverage of contemporary photography, thanks.
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"waiting for the eye of the camera to do what you wanted it to do"
Illusion delusion?
Hogwash! These photos as with 90% of others in galleries these days are NOT FINE ART! Photography as art has been dead for decades.
There are so many facets to explore when discussing photography, but isn’t it interesting that a writer is never asked to reduce their art to a single picture? Yet the photographer is expected to append a flurry - more or less - of words to explain the image(s). This is somehow fundamentally wrong.
At the suggestion of a good friend, an accomplished fine art photographer, I have begun to ask viewers of my own photographs:
“What do you see?”
I listen carefully, and the answers are as varied as the people; all seem valid, and for me, enlightening.
The photographer is but one set of eyes, and their task ought not be to append anything more than the image itself conveys.
It seems to me that photography’s immense power, however approached and practiced, is in its stillness, in its ability to capture a fraction of a second in the Continuum, and tell a story that speaks to each person differently in that stillness.
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Excellent discussion--thank you.
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